PowerPoint Turns 20 on Windows Vista after Debuting on Mac

With the latest version of PowerPoint available to the general consumers concomitantly with the Office 2007 system on January 30 2007, and to businesses since November 30 2006, Microsoft has celebrated the product's 20-year anniversary. PowerPoint was put together between 1984 and 1987 by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin (originally the head the software design and development), and the product became the core of the Forethought, Inc. after Gaskins joined the company.

"PowerPoint 1.0 (for Mac, April 1987) produced as output black-and-white overhead transparencies (together with speaker's notes and audience handouts). PowerPoint 2.0 (for Mac, May 1988, and for Windows, May 1990) added output of professional 35mm color slides including online transmission to overnight imaging and processing by Genigraphics. PowerPoint 3.0 (for Windows, May 1992, and for Mac, September 1992) added output of live video color slideshows including slide transitions, builds, animations, and synchronized sound and video clips," reads a fragment from Gaskins' website.

PowerPoint, now a ubiquitous slide-show application, was an immense success from the get go. In excess of $1 million worth of PowerPoint products were sold in just the first day of availability on the Mac platform, back in 1987. Just three months later, Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates made an offer for PowerPoint.

"PowerPoint history was sharply changed by accepting an offer from Bill Gates to buy PowerPoint and to turn Forethought into Microsoft's Graphics Business Unit, to be located in Silicon Valley. This was Microsoft's first significant acquisition. The price was $14 million in cash," Gaskins added.

20 years latter, Microsoft shipped Office PowerPoint 2007, and the application that has debuted on the Mac in 1987 is - along with Word and Excel - synonymous with the Redmond Company's productivity suite. "PowerPoint revenues grew to well over $100 million annually (in 1992), about half from outside the U.S. (...) By 2003, PowerPoint revenues for Microsoft exceded $1 billion annually. By then PowerPoint was being used by over 500 million people worldwide, with over 30 million PowerPoint presentations being made every day."